Scammers continue to abuse the GoDaddy auctions system by taking advantage of its flawed policies on non-paying bidders.
Tens of thousands of dollars in revenue are effectively lost daily, as an apparently organized and persistent ring of unscrupulous bidders gang up on legitimate GoDaddy bidders.
Time and again, the non-paying winner and their accomplishes “force” GoDaddy to assign the domain at a much, much lower price. The cybercriminals have found a process that they exploit at the expense of Joe Domainer, who expects equal bidding chances at a public auction.
Industry tracker, NameBio.com, continues to track the winning auctions and their reported adjustment payouts. Said Michael Sumner of NameBio in a recent post:
“GoDaddy would be doing themselves a huge favor if they would acknowledge that the rollback system is fundamentally flawed, and stop being content with band aids like manual policing.”
The latest sample of rolled back auctions (winning amount vs. actual amount that was paid) is quite astonishing to look at:
MoonDog.com from $12,500 to $10.
MillionDollarIdeas.com from $7,200 to $515.
X8Bet.com from $67,666 to $10.
MyUniversity.com from $12,150 to $22.
AdPerk.com from $5,800 to $10.
UnleashedLife.com from $4,000 to $35.
FloHome.com from $30,278 to $25.
0241.com from $35,005 to $5,300.
GifSoup.com from $21,350 to $120.
Why GoDaddy does not establish a policy that links accounts to credit cards is beyond our understanding.
Serious domain marketplaces such as SAV and Namecheap have established the pre-authorization of credit cards, ensuring the integrity of their platforms.
It’s a shame that GoDaddy won’t do anything to resolve this once and for all.
In the domain name list you just posted, does the second value represent what was actually paid for the domain name?
@Anonymous – Correct. The first number is the auction result, the second number is what GoDaddy ended up collecting from the accomplice of the scammer winner.
Doing a proper KYC and then only allowing bidding above a certain threshold could somewhat fix this, if not all. Isn’t it that simple?
They should at least try addressing this issues.